Murder in the Rue Dumas : A Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal Mystery (9781101603185)

by Longworth, M. l.

  “Where did you go?” Verlaque asked.

  Once again, the words came quickly and easily, and Verlaque wondered if they had been rehearsed. “I went and got my car out of the public parking garage and drove home, naturally. I live in an apartment on the avenue Philippe Solari, just north of downtown.”

  “What time did you get home?” Paulik asked.

  “It was just before 10:00 p.m., because I watched the news at 10:00 p.m. on television. Nothing else seems to be worth watching. I then read for a bit, then turned off the lights at 11:00 p.m.”

  “Do you live alone?” Verlaque asked.

  “Yes, I’ve been separated from my wife for over a year now. She kept the house, in Puyricard.”

  “Did anyone see or hear you come home?” Paulik asked.

  Rodier seemed surprised by the question, as if he only now realized that he was being asked for an alibi.

  “Well, no,” he answered, this time slowly and awkwardly. “My apartment is on the ground floor, in the back of the building. My neighbors who live above, a young couple, came home late, after I had already turned in for the evening. I heard them laughing in the hallway.”

  Paulik silently noted that both Rodier and his assistant lived in ground-floor flats and neither had an alibi.

  “Were your dealings with Dr. Moutte usually this confrontational?”

  “No, not at all! We get…oh, I mean got…on quite well, considering…”

  Verlaque turned from Paulik to Rodier.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, that Georges and I are on opposite sides of the history of Catholicism in France. He’s a Cluniac specialist, and I research the Cistercians.” Rodier smiled for the first time. “He lived very opulently, like the priests he studied.”

  “Are you saying that you have a problem with that?” Verlaque asked.

  “No, no,” Rodier answered, stammering. “What I meant, no judgment intended, was that I live very differently.”

  “But surely not in a cave or a remote monastery?”

  Rodier chuckled, falsely, Verlaque thought. “No, but not as austerely as I should. Simply, let’s say.”

  “Do you know a lot about art?” Paulik asked. “The doyen was a collector, was he not?”

  “Yes, he was. But I have a very basic, undergraduate-level knowledge of the history of art,” Rodier answered. “That was the one thing we disagreed on. I thought his art collecting…frivolous. That aside, we normally get on quite well, and he had all but promised me the…”

  “Post of doyen?” Verlaque finished Rodier’s sentence for him.

  Rodier nodded. “Yes. Drs. Rocchia and Leonetti seem to think they were destined for the job, but just last week Georges said to me, ‘When you’re in this office…’ So you see why I was so upset, and surprised, at his outburst and announcement on Friday evening. I was so confident that I even had Claude, my graduate assistant, pack up the bookshelves in my office!”

  Rodier suddenly let out a long sigh that sounded to Paulik like the same kind of sigh Léa released when she wasn’t permitted a second helping of Nutella: overly theatrical.

  “Your assistant, Claude, he wasn’t at the party…” Verlaque said.

  Rodier smiled. “Oh no, a party is not Claude’s cup of tea, I’m afraid. He was at the library, following up on something we had come across in our research earlier that day.”

  “And you didn’t tell Claude on Friday night what happened at the party?” Verlaque asked, double-checking Claude’s answer. “Did he know that the doyen had canceled his retirement?”

  “No, I didn’t call Claude. I don’t have a cell phone nor does Claude. I called Claude from home later the next day. But I did stop at a phone booth and called my ex-wife on my way to get my car after the party.”

  Verlaque raised his eyebrows. “Really?”

  Rodier shrugged. “We were married for thirty years, and she knew Georges. She had always complained about him, telling me that he was two-faced and that he was more interested in his glass, and in women, than in the university. I called her to tell her what he had just done. She was furious!”

  “And then you went home?” Paulik asked.

  “Yes. The streets in the Mazarin were oddly quiet. I went home, watched the news, read, and then went to bed.”

  When the interviews were finished for the day, Dr. Rodier walked the three miles back to his apartment. The latter bit was up a steep hill, but he didn’t like using his car every day. Bruno Paulik went to hunt down stronger coffee and Verlaque sat in silence, doodling on his notepaper. It had been interesting to interview student and teacher back-to-back, as Paulik had suggested. Something was bothering Verlaque during Rodier’s interview, and he now realized what: the student had been the more mature and better spoken of the two. If Verlaque had been an undergrad and had to pick between a class given by Ossart or Rodier, Verlaque knew that he would choose Claude Ossart’s class, hands down.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Home Is So Sad

  Paulik and Verlaque agreed that on Monday morning they would take a look at Georges Moutte’s apartment and continue any interviews necessary. They still needed to speak to the cleaning woman who had discovered the doyen’s body on Saturday morning. A refugee from Rwanda who had seen too many murders as a young girl, she had been given sedatives by a doctor and had been sent home to rest. She, unlike the boys, had been worried, or curious enough, to lean in close to the body and discover that the doyen had been bludgeoned to death.

  Verlaque was exhausted and drove home and parked his car in the garage just north of the ring road that looped around Aix’s old center. He walked home past the cathedral, its sculptures lit up. Surprisingly most of the saints still had heads, unlike other churches in France whose saints’ heads were removed during the Revolution. It was a Sunday night and the town was still, and although Verlaque regretted the fact that his refrigerator was empty and he wouldn’t be able to cook, he loved Aix when its streets were empty, a rarity. He turned left into the empty place de l’Archevêché, which in the summer would be full of operagoers, turned right and walked to the end of his street, the tiny rue Adamson. He decided that he would, as he did two or three times a year, call for a pizza to be delivered. He forced himself to run up the five flights to his apartment and was relieved to open the door and be among his treasured books, paintings, and objects. Plugging his cell phone in to charge, he checked the landline for possible messages from Marine, whom he had abandoned in the Luberon. There were no messages. He ordered his pizza, grabbed a cold beer from the fridge, and then walked to the bathroom in the back of his apartment, where he undressed and showered. The pizza arrived just as he had sat down with a book of poetry. He ate three quarters of it and put the rest in the fridge. He thought of Bruno Paulik, who would be home with a hot meal and his wife and daughter at his side.

  The telephone rang and he crossed the living room to answer it, flopping down in a leather club chair. Seeing that it was Marine’s number, he said, in English, “Hey.”

  “Hello, Antoine,” Marine answered. “How did it go today?”

  “Well, it’s always the same with a day of interviews—the day goes by quickly, but when you get home you realize how exhausting it all was. No one confessed, as you may have guessed.”

  Marine paused, waiting for Verlaque to continue speaking, but he did not. “I had day-old coffee with my mother,” she finally said. “And day-old store-bought croissants.”

  “Yum. Remind me to swing by there tomorrow morning for breakfast.”

  Marine laughed. “Antoine,” she softly said. “Where is this all going?”

  He looked down at the coffee table where his book of poems was lying, as if the poets of England would offer him some advice.

  “You’ve been so patient, Marine,” was all he could say. It was Marine who stayed silent this time, forcing Verlaque to continue speaking. “You’re always a bit sad after a visit to your parents’ house.”

  “Especially
when my papa isn’t there,” Marine answered. Verlaque thought it endearing that she referred to her parents as Maman and Papa. He used the polite vous with his.

  “But I’m used to it,” she continued. “What I’d like to straighten out, or understand, is our relationship. I don’t want to say something corny in the vein of ‘my clock is ticking,’ but I’m getting tired of the uncertainty. I’d like to see you every evening, to know that you’ll be there for me when I get home at night. That’s where I am in the relationship, but I think you’re miles behind.”

  Verlaque’s eyes watered. “Not miles, Marine. I may be closer than you think. Can you come over for dinner tomorrow night?”

  It was the second invitation to dinner Marine had had from a handsome man that week. She had run into Eric Bley, a fellow lawyer, in a café, Le Mazarin, and he had asked her out. A simple, direct invitation as he looked her in the eyes. Sylvie had sat, with her back against the wall, speechless. “He’s so hot,” she had whispered when Marine sat back down.

  “Yes, he is,” Marine answered. “But I turned him down.”

  Sylvie raised her hands up to the all-seeing yellow ceiling of the café. “Please, send my friend some common sense.”

  “All right,” Marine finally answered to Verlaque’s invitation. “I’ll come over tomorrow. Sleep well.”

  And Verlaque did sleep well that night, a dreamless solid eight hours, and he awoke without the alarm. He walked over to the window and pulled aside the dark gray linen drapes and looked at the cathedral’s spire, still lit, although a bluish morning sky had appeared.

  He made himself an espresso. Leaving the apartment, he walked quickly, head down, and avoided the streets that would take him past Le Mazarin. He got to the Pâtisserie Michaud just after 9:00 a.m. but cursed as its blinds were still drawn—it was closed Mondays, and since he had worked over the weekend he had forgotten what day of the week it was. He walked down the rue Laroque and turned left on the rue Cardinale, which would take him to the doyen’s apartment.

  “Home is so sad,” Verlaque said once he’d joined Paulik and they slowly walked around Georges Moutte’s living room.

  “Pardon me, sir?” Paulik asked, turning from a nineteenth-century oil painting of a stormy sea.

  “Sorry, it’s the first bit of a poem,” Verlaque said, and continued in English, “‘Home is so sad / It stays as it was left, Shaped to the comfort of the last to go / As if to win them back.’”

  Bruno Paulik frowned and then said, “I think I understand it, although I was rotten in English at school. The home, when no one is in it, is sad. Right?” Paulik looked around the apartment and added, “But this room would be sad even with someone using it, wouldn’t it?”

  “Very much so. Look at these chairs…” Verlaque said as he smacked the back of a stiff armchair, identical to its neighbors, all with cane seats and wooden armrests. “It doesn’t exactly invite conversation or a good time, does it?”

  “And they’re spaced so far apart…any conversation would be awkward,” Paulik added.

  “Yes, what’s unsaid becomes more important than what’s said.”

  Bruno Paulik looked at the judge and nodded, intrigued.

  “My parents have the same kind of rooms in Paris,” Verlaque continued, sighing. “So sad.”

  Paulik opened his mouth to comment but then decided against it. He knew bits and pieces about the judge’s family—most of the information coming from fellow policemen: that the Verlaque family fortune came from a business begun by his grandfather, but nobody knew quite what the business was—the ideas most frequently suggested were car manufacturing, a supermarket chain, or publishing. Paulik knew that Antoine Verlaque had been raised in Paris very close to the Louvre and that he had an English grandmother. The commissioner continued walking around the room and then stopped in the doorway and said, “Look at this. These old apartments are en enfilade. You can see all the way through the apartment. That’s a bedroom down at the end, five…no, six rooms down, I would guess.”

  Verlaque walked across the room to join his commissioner. “It’s a huge apartment for one person, isn’t it? I guess if you lived alone you’d keep all the doors open, just as he did, wouldn’t you? It seems even bigger when you can see from room to room. And the service rooms? Kitchen, bathroom…they’re all on the other side?”

  “Yeah, on the garden side of the building. There’s probably a cafoutche too, which we should look in.”

  “Cafoutche?”

  “Oh, sorry, sir. It’s a Marseillais word for a storage room.” Paulik turned toward the window that looked over the square below. He could hear the fountain’s water gurgling, and the voices of walkers below. “Hey, look at this,” he said.

  Verlaque looked out the window.

  “No, sir, look at the window itself.”

  “The wood’s rotting,” Verlaque said.

  “Yeah. The first thing Hélène and I did when we bought our place was put in new windows. You’d think that a single man with a good income would do that. But then he didn’t pay for the apartment, did he?”

  “No. It’s part of the foundation.”

  “So is the foundation running out of money?” Paulik suggested.

  “More likely Moutte couldn’t handle the red tape at city hall. This is a registered building, as my apartment is, and I had to pull strings to get my windows replaced, even with windows the same size and style as the originals. It took forever, even with connections,” Verlaque said as he watched some boys from the junior high school down the street get dropped off for school, shifting their heavy backpacks onto their backs. It was the same school that Cézanne and Zola had attended, inseparable best friends before they had their famous falling-out as adults. As teenagers the soon-to-be painter and writer would exchange ideas at Les Deux Garçons, still Aix’s most celebrated café. Verlaque loved its faded and elegant interior, its gilded mirrors and yellowed walls, but he rarely went, a combination of too many white-haired locals and too many tourists causing the waiters to be surly and the service slow. “Let’s go into the dining room. I haven’t seen any of these famous glass vases yet,” he said.

  They turned away from the window and Paulik led the way into the next room, reading a message on his cell phone that had just come in. “Message from Yves Roussel,” he said. “Another bank machine was blown up early this morning in Calas.”

  Verlaque frowned. “Calas is tiny.”

  “I know. But big enough to have a bank, apparently. Wow,” he said as he stepped into the dining room, its walls sadly lined with dull floral wallpaper, awkwardly competing with the frescoed ceiling above.

  “More frescoes?” Verlaque asked. “Oh, I see now. Wow is right,” he continued, looking in the same direction as Paulik at a three-foot-high glass vase that sat in the middle of the dining table. The vase was one and a half feet wide at its thickest point in the middle. Its dark brown base was covered with bright red foliage that came from oak trees that spread around the vase. The vase’s painted sky was bright yellow, most likely a sunset.

  “This is a Gallé, I take it?” Bruno Paulik asked.

  “Yes, I think so,” Verlaque said, leaning in and slipping on his reading glasses. “Look, it’s signed at the bottom. I had no idea glass could be so beautiful.”

  “Neither did I. Here’s another one.” On the fireplace’s black marble mantel was a smaller vase, two feet high. Immense pale pink flowers with yellow centers covered the smoky-white glass vase, their long spiky petals reaching toward the top, which had a gold ornamental trim, also in a floral motif. “What kind of…?” Verlaque asked.

  “Chrysanthemums, sir,” his commissioner answered.

  Verlaque smiled. “Thanks. Can you put a call into the Petit Palais in Paris and ask to speak to the decorative arts curator there? We need to price these things.”

  “Sure, I’ll take some photos later. Look…here’s a lamp with a base that looks like it was made from a Gallé vase.”

  The lamp had
a gold body with orange and red tulips, and a bronze base and handle. Paulik reached down and turned the light on and off, curious to see how the glass looked under light.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” a familiar high-pitched voice rang out from the doorway of the dining room. Verlaque whirled around and saw his commissioner openmouthed, and before Paulik could say anything Verlaque said, slowly and with as low a voice as he could muster, “I beg your pardon?”

  “That’s a Gallé lamp! Circa 1914!”

  “Mlle Zacharie, you need to lower your voice when speaking to a commissioner and an examining magistrate. Secondly, you are, as a member of the general public, not supposed to be in this apartment. How did you get by the officer downstairs?”

  The doyen’s secretary shrugged. “I told him who I was and that I needed some papers from Dr. Moutte’s home office.” Verlaque and Paulik exchanged looks, Paulik knowing that whoever the officer was, he wouldn’t be having a good evening.

  “What kind of papers couldn’t wait?” Verlaque asked, staring at the young woman with a mixture of contempt and disbelief.

  Audrey Zacharie sighed. “It’s for Claude Ossart. After speaking with you he came into my office practically weeping. He’s frantically trying to find a research grant that the doyen was supposed to sign for him. It needs to be mailed by tomorrow at 6:00 p.m.”

  “And what makes you think you’ll find it here?”

  “Well, I’m not allowed to even go into Dr. Moutte’s office at school, am I?” she asked with a good dose of sarcasm. “Buuuut, I did have a peek through the doorway from my office into his and I didn’t see his briefcase, which makes sense, he would have brought it home with him Friday night. Righto?” Verlaque heard Paulik whisper something under his cough, but the secretary continued unperturbed. “I hoped I could just quickly look in his office here.”

  Having finished her explanation, she looked away from Verlaque and toward the open door that led to the next room. “Wait a minute! Who opened all these doors? They’re always closed!”